Smith Translations of French Poetry
Posted by:
David Dunais (IP Logged)
Date: 16 December, 2004 10:24AM
Hi,
As Phillip Gindre told you, I'm trying to annotate Smith's translations of French poetry.
Comparing with D. Sydney-Fryer'Emperor of Dreams, it appeared that several of thoses french translations are missing in this website, and consequently in my corpus : Here are the references :
- Le Coucher du Soleil romantique, the United Amateur, 1926,
- Epigraphe pour un livre condamné, Weird tales, March 1928,
- The Balcony, The Auburn Journal, 24/09/1925 (as Le Balcon),
- Beauty, the Auburn Journal, 12/03/1925 (la Beauté),
- Causerie, The Auburn Journal, 07/05/1925,
- the Evil Monk, the Auburn Journal, 10/12/1925, (as Le Mauvais Moine)
- La Mort des Artistes, Auburn Journal, 06/08/1925 (as Le Vin des Amants)
I wrote to Weird Tales and Lars Klores kindly send me a copy of "Epigraphe pour un livre condamné". Here it goes :
Bucolic reader, reader wholly
Simple, sober and benign,
Cast down this volume saturnine
And orgiaque and melancholy.
If thou hast learned no lessonry
Of Satan, wileful dean and wise,
Herein were naught for thy surmise,
And madness were my words to thee.
But if thy vision, unbeguiled,
Can dive adown the gulfs of hell,
Read me, and learn to love me well;
Tormented soul, alone, exiled,
And fain of some lost realm divine,
Pity me . . . lest my curse be thine.
I've contacted the Auburn Journal but don't have any reply yet.
Does any among you guys have "Le Coucher du Soleil romantique", the United Amateur, may 1926 ?
I have two questions, based on the simple fact that I, alas, don't have Smith's poetry collections in my bookshelves. May be some one can help :
The comparaison between the first (?) draft of Smith translation of Baudelaire "A Parisien Dream" as it is printed in Sword of Zagan and the translation on Eldritch - from the Selected Poems - show huge differences.
It suggested me to wonder if such is the case for other poems : Smith has been translating Baudelaire quite early and it seems he never totally left this activity.
1 - Thus, several poems might have more or less important modification from an edition to an other ;
2 - There was in the posthumous "Selected Poems" unpreviously published poems, but the texts of poems previously published was it the same than previous edition ? or was it from Smith papers with corrections of them ? Were there a posthumous correction, somehow ? - I'm afraid my writing skills in english are pretty poor (I realize how exotic it may sound) but I suppose you caught my point -
Second question :
In Baudelaire's Les Fleur du Mal, the organisation of the collection is in itself very important, meaningfull. In Baudelaire's case, it's most probably a reminicence of Petrarquism and french poetry of the XVI century, and motivated by the theme of "correspondances".
Is there such an tradition in english poetry ?
Well, I strongly suppose it is the case in Smith collections : organisation of poems making the collection itself a poem.
Would could provide me the order of the tables of contents of Smith collections ?
Warm regards,
David